Diasporic Dining XXX: Kutsher's

In its heyday in the 50’s Kutsher’s, along with Grossinger’s, was one of the great resorts of the Catskills. Now Kutsher’s still hobbles along, a shadow of what its once was, a victim of the exodus of its Jewish constituency to Florida and Grossinger's is no more. For those who mourn the passing of establishments like Kutsher’s and prefer the past to the present, there are two alternatives: the first is to find a little pocket of the past where time has stopped (like the character in a famous Twilight Zone, "A Stop at Willoughby") and the other is post-modernism. Kutsher’s, a restaurant on Franklin Street inTribeca, established by a new generation of the Kutsher clan, tips its head to the past, serving things like matzoh ball soup, charcuterie (pastrami, salami etc), kreplach, Roumanian steak and latkes in a haute cuisine and high fashion setting. Ironically the décor partakes of a style of restaurant architecture that pays homage to the fifties and that was in fact exemplified by an episode of the post-modernist television program Mad Men in which Tip Toe Inn, another 50’s institution was recreated. If you are looking for real deli,you’d better go out to the Mill Basin Kosher Deli in Brooklyn or, Loeser’s in the Bronx with their trademark hotdogs and knishes sitting on an aluminum covered grills and salamis hanging in windows . These last survivors will offer a worm hole through which one can journey back without having to actually die, as the Twilight Zone character, who is fed up with the pressures of modernity, does. The dishes at Kutshers are really high priced citations in which memory has informed a new kind of cuisine. Cholent and stuffed derma were absent from the menu (and one wonders if the Kutsher’s kitchen has any plans to reintroduce these favorite cardio busters), though a version of schmaltz was available at post-modernist prices.